


springtime reunion

by mistyheartrbs



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: (until s4 airs anyway), Canon Compliant, F/F, Timeskip
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-10
Updated: 2020-04-10
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:21:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23578342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mistyheartrbs/pseuds/mistyheartrbs
Summary: Waverly thinks that getting out of a presumed-mythical garden-slash-hell-dimension in just under a week is pretty impressive.
Relationships: Waverly Earp & Wynonna Earp, Waverly Earp/Nicole Haught, Wynonna Earp & Nicole Haught
Comments: 2
Kudos: 53





	springtime reunion

**Author's Note:**

> so maybe i watched the wynonna marathon on syfy yesterday and maybe i churned this out and yeah...

Wynonna rescues Nicole and Jeremy and the others with little trouble, and Nicole’s eyes go dark and angry as soon as they’re back at the homestead, and Wynonna bears all the _you DRUGGED us?_ and _what, you just thought we were all too incompetent to help you?_ until Nicole looks around, terrified of what she already knows, and Wynonna can see her heart sinking in real time.

“Where’s Waverly?”

***

They keep searching, after that. They put away their feud and Wynonna learns that Nicole was a rebel in college and that they’re both messes, really, it’s just that Nicole is better at hiding it behind her knight in shining khaki schtick and neither of them want to give up, but… 

Time takes its toll, as it does, as the searches grow more fruitless and more desperate and eventually Nicole moves in, and she says it’s because her old house is too big to take care of by herself but they both know it’s really because she’s lonely. And Wynonna isn’t the worst, as far as roommates go, even if she leaves her bras everywhere even after Nicole _specifically_ marked a drawer for them and honestly, Wynonna, how did you even _get_ that there? She’s more talkative than Calamity Jane, anyhow, who also moved in because of course she did, and she settles in fine hunting the mice in the barn and little Alice calls her “Bitty” because she couldn’t pronounce Big Kitty and she definitely couldn’t pronounce Calamity Jane, what with all the syllables. 

Wynonna gets her a tag that says “Bitty” and it’s what passes for a joke, now. 

They keep looking for Waverly and Doc, but it stops being an endeavor full of any hope and is instead now a terrible and bizarre sort of grieving process. 

Nicole still looks at the ring on her finger, from time to time, and when someone asks her if she’s married she just sort of stands there, waiting for them to leave, and eventually the Sheriff’s love life becomes one of those topics everyone knows to avoid. 

***

Waverly thinks that getting out of a presumed-mythical garden-slash-hell-dimension in just under a week is pretty impressive. She used to time herself on those little mazes in the backs of the _Highlights_ magazines when she was a kid, and it had paid off, because she and Doc had escaped with only a handful of injuries, treatable ones, and a few mental scars they both planned to put away as soon as they could. 

The ground is still covered in snow, and Waverly thinks that this is a little weird, because spring was starting when Wynonna fought Bulshar, but then again a lot can happen in a week. There might have been a freak snowstorm. It’s not like she had much time to check the weather forecast, fighting an ancient evil and all of that. There had been more important things to worry about.

(At this thought, she looks down at her ring finger, and Doc murmurs something about Sheriff Haught probably worrying sick about her, so they should get home, shouldn’t they?)

There’s a little sapling growing near the edge of the Ghost River Triangle. Waverly figures that the garden must have messed with her head more than she’d initially thought.

***

Wynonna gets up and goes downstairs and fills a novelty mug (it says “my puns are” and then has a picture of a koala and a picture of a teacup and she found it at a flea market and Nicole hates it) with water because she woke up with her mouth feeling like it was full of lint and they’re out of whiskey and she’s never liked the plasticky feeling of Alice’s kid cups and Nicole keeps posting these passive-aggressive _hydrate or die-drate_ sticky notes around everywhere. Wynonna thinks the koala pun is better. 

There’s a knock at the door and Wynonna sluggishly gets up, hand moving to her hip of its own accord (muscle memory, of course, it’s hard to get rid of something like that), and she opens it and the mug shatters on the floor. 

***

“Surprise!” Waverly says, with the cheer of someone who definitely plans to compartmentalize all of this later. Doc stands behind her, hat pressed to his chest. Wynonna is frozen. “Wynonna? You look like you’ve just seen a ghost.”

Wynonna fumbles around for something until she pulls out an oversized sword and jabs it directly at Waverly’s throat. 

“I might be retired, but this glorified coat hanger is still good for something,” she growls, low and angry and scared. Waverly’s brain starts clicking away like it does, and she searches for some reason why this isn’t-

“Wynonna?” Nicole shows up behind her, holding a toddler - a _toddler?_ \- in her arms. She wobbles at the sight of the pair and Waverly can’t hide from it anymore because-

“Auntie ‘Cole?” the toddler asks, chewing on Nicole’s hair, which is longer than it was last time it is longer than it was last time right? Or maybe the garden muddled things again and-

“It’s okay, Alice, it’s okay,” Nicole murmurs, then looks back at Waverly and Doc, and _no it can’t be she’s hardly a year old-_ “Is this some kind of sick joke?”

“It had better not be.” Wynonna waves the sword closer again. Waverly steps back. “If this is some kind of shapeshifter they’ve gone too far, they’ve-”

“Wynonna!” Waverly interjects, and Wynonna startles, and so does Nicole, and Calamity Jane pads over and just kind of tilts her head to the side. “It’s me.”

“Prove it.”

“When we were kids I set up courses for my hamster Pikachu and you stopped him from escaping into the house. I beat the mazes in those magazines. Nicole, we kissed for the first time in Nedley’s office and we met because you walked into Shorty’s and-”

Wynonna lowers the sword - Peacemaker, it’s a sword now for some reason - and Waverly doesn’t realize how quickly she’s breathing until she walks inside and her heart is pounding through her feet. 

“How long were we gone?” she whispers, afraid of the answer. Alice looks at her with those giant blue eyes and based on how much she’s wriggling in Nicole’s arms she can probably walk and she heard her talk so she’s probably at least three which means-

“Two years,” Wynonna says without looking at her, voice thick with sadness. “You were gone for two years, babygirl.” Despite everything, despite every answer, she still has to say it-

“No. That’s not right. We were gone for a week. We were trapped in there for a week. Right, Doc?”

“I must say, Waverly, that my perception of time may not match the average individual’s due to my unfortunate experience in a well for one hundred and thirty-odd years, but it did feel like seven days to me.” 

“It was two years.” Wynonna shakes her head. “We thought you’d…” She doesn’t finish the thought. Waverly is afraid of what would happen if she did. Nicole just stares at her like she’s not real. 

It’s like the world isn’t real, though, so maybe it all makes a strange kind of sense.

***

Wynonna and Doc talk outside, and Waverly wonders if it’s because Wynonna is still afraid she’s not really herself, but she apparently trusts whatever she’s supposed to be enough to leave her alone with Nicole, who’s put Alice to bed and sits across the table from her, looking down. They don’t speak for a while, and the homestead is filled with the sound of Waverly eating a plain slice of bread because they didn’t have much else in the fridge and even if time had been...off, wrong, whatever, in the garden, there hadn’t been much in the way of food, so she was ravenous.

Doc, being a former immortal-slash-former-vampire, either hadn’t been quite so peckish or just didn’t want to impose.

Nicole looks tired. Waverly thinks she’ll break if she keeps looking at her like that.

***

“I know it’s you,” Nicole says, because she does, and maybe it’s because she isn’t as- hardened, or what have you, as Wynonna is, or maybe it’s because she’s too hopeful, but she just knows this is really Waverly, deep in the marrow of her bones. “If that helps.”

“It does.” Waverly reaches across the table - it might as well be a vast chasm - and holds Nicole’s hand, and Nicole’s heart twists violently in her chest. “How...what happened? When I was gone?”

“We didn’t stop looking,” Nicole says, and she wonders if this is how Wynonna felt when she found Willa in that cult in the woods, like the guilt would crush her. “After a while we just thought you were…”

“I know.” 

“So I moved in, and after a while there weren’t any demons or monsters coming after us, so Wynonna picked Alice up and brought her back and it’s been…we’ve been trying.” 

“I’m so sorry, Nicole.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“I thought- it felt like a week. Like it hadn’t been any time at all.” Waverly frowns, and that little furrow between her eyebrows forms like it always did when she was thinking about demon logic (even if that was an oxymoron) and Nicole just _knows_ this isn’t an imposter, or a shapeshifter, or something possessing her, just Waverly, a little confused and a little tired, but still Waverly. 

“We have time now.” Nicole feels Waverly’s eyes wander to her ring finger, to what lay there. Waverly opens her mouth, licks her lips. 

“Would you…”

“Yes.” Nicole gets up from the table, then, can’t stand being apart from her ever again. “A thousand times yes, Waverly, in a thousand different worlds.” They fit, like...not halves of a whole, exactly, but something like that. Something that bound the universe together. 

“It’ll be a weird wedding,” Waverly whispers, and Nicole sweeps her up like they’re a couple in an old-timey movie and two years haven’t passed at all. 

“I can’t imagine it any other way.” And it’s one of those kisses where they meet right in the middle, and Waverly tastes like foreign plants and bread and coming home.

***

Wynonna is practicing with Peacemaker-the-sword when Waverly finds her, swinging it at an invisible opponent, panting, nearly shaking with rage. Doc is somewhere in town, figuring out his finances and reuniting with Jeremy and Robin, or so he says. 

“You’ve gotten better at that!” Waverly calls out from the porch. Wynonna turns around.

“You didn’t kill Haughtstuff.” She hoists Peacemaker over her shoulder, starts making her way back to the porch.

“I wouldn’t hurt my fiancée.” 

“It really is you.”

“I know that I just-”

“Two years.” Wynonna grits her teeth. “Two years. I thought you were _dead,_ Waverly. I thought I’d failed _twice_ and now you’re back and-”

“Wynonna. It’s fine.” And it’s not, really, but it’ll have to be. There isn’t really an alternative. “I’m…I’m glad to be back. And I’m glad the curse is broken and Alice is home.”

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Wynonna’s voice softens, and she jams Peacemaker into the snow, leans on the hilt. It’s really way too big to be classified a sword. “A little tyrant when it’s naptime, though. The kid could probably outscream a coyote.” 

“She takes after her mom.”

“We told her stories about you. Auntie Waverly, the angel. I don’t think she’s made the connection yet. She probably thinks you’re a character, like Anna from _Frozen.”_

“How many times have you-”

“Too many.” The dry deadpan in her voice is enough to make Waverly chuckle. “I hear ‘Let It Go’ in my nightmares.”

“I’m not leaving again.” It just seems like the right thing to say, then.

“I know.” Wynonna picks Peacemaker back up and starts up the steps. “Let’s go back inside. They’re waiting for us, and it’s cold.”

“Okay.” Waverly looks out at the snow-covered fields, and she notices a little violet growing, easy to miss, easier to ignore. “It’s almost springtime, isn’t it?”

“Something like that.” Wynonna holds open the door. “Come on. Your fiancée’s waiting in there.” And indeed, Nicole is standing in the hallway, smiling, and when the three of them hug it’s a relief, it’s comfortable, it’s…

It’s _good._

And that's something, at least.

**Author's Note:**

> if we do get a timeskip i NEED to see wynonna and nicole's roommate antics.
> 
> stay safe. keep in touch with your loved ones (safely, via remote services such as zoom/discord/what have you). know it'll be okay.


End file.
